To post a question, start here:
http://forums.cnet.com
Pick a forum from the directory which is the most appropriate for your topic/question.
Go to that forum, look for the bright red "Create a new discussion" button on the right hand side of the page and click on that. You should see a submission form appear in front of you.
Post your question in the form and submit it. That's it!
Just remember: If you're asking for technical help, please be sure to include all your system info, including operating system, model number, and any other specifics related to the problem. Also please exercise your best judgment when posting in the forums--revealing personal information such as your e-mail address, telephone number, and address is not recommended.
Let me know if that works for you.
Cheers!
-Lee
Hello everyone!
We are now live with the new forums platform! Woo hoo!!
At a glance you may not notice much of a difference, as we've retained most of the look and feel and feature set of our legacy forums system. However, we are using a completely new in house forums platform.
So what does this mean exactly? This new platform will give us a lot more flexibility to grow the forums, not only in terms of scale, but also for adding new features, which was a challenge in our previous platform. This is a huge win for us!
While we didn't change a whole lot in the forums user experience, here are the most notable changes that you may have noticed already:
-- Every submission form is now in line! Anything from creating a new discussion or reply, to reporting offensive posts or emailing a friend are all in line or appear in a modal form (a form which opens directly on top of the browser page). What this means is that you no longer have to be taken through several pages to submit content, it all happens on the same page you are currently on.
-- There are now true permalink pages for all forum posts. If you click on the chain link icon within any post, you will be taken to a page with that specific post only--which allows for easier referencing.
-- Logging into the forums will be through a modal window rather than going to a separate login/registration page.
-- No more flat and tree views, just the hybrid view, which is the combination of both threaded and tree view. Some notes about the hybrid view:
-- You'll be able to choose to either view the discussion thread in the expanded or collapsed view (the link to select your preference is located directly below the first post in the gray bar). Once you select the view you like, this setting will be saved automatically as a cookie in your browser. As long as that preference cookie is not deleted, you will remain in the view you've selected. By default, everyone will see the expanded view, until you select collapsed. With the move to the new platform, we are no longer storing the forum views preferences for each individual and we will be eliminating the forum preference page all together.
-- When viewing the thread in the collapsed view, you can expand each post individually by clicking on the "+" plus icon (located on the left of the each subject line), and clicking the "-" minus icon will collapse the post. Expanding or collapsing individual posts will not change your default setting.
-- The first post in a discussion thread will always remain expanded regardless of which view it is in, and it will remain expanded at the top of the forums thread even if you paginate through the thread (you will see the thread starter on Page 2, Page 3, etc.).
-- Regardless which view is selected, 30 posts in the thread will always be displayed on one page. And pagination of the thread is the same as in our legacy platform.
-- Search has been completely overhauled, and there's no more advanced search page. You will no longer be able to search within a forum or thread. While these were great features, usage was minimal. We also did a lot of consulting with our search team and came up with the better solution to give you search results that would make the most sense.
-- The permalink, report offensive post, and email a friend feature will be displayed with icons only (we have removed the text alongside of them) and if you hover over those icons it will display text to tell you what each feature is for.
-- Tracked discussion email updates will be hourly rather than immediately and it will be a digest of all updated threads rather than being individual emails sent. While we did want to keep it as immediately, the new system didn't have the flexibility for it without additional engineering work. Eventually, on Phase 2 of the forums redesign, we will have more customizable options for tracked discussion emails, like frequency, html, etc.
Here are some know issues about the Forum tracked discussion emails in the new platform and we will be working through these bugs.
-- Your tracked discussion from the legacy forums will be migrated to the new platform and available to you on 9/30/2010. You should not have a problem tracking discussions in the new platform now.
-- Tracked discussion notification emails when sent to you will have the subject line of "CNET Reviews Alerts"
-- Links in tracked discussion emails will only take you to the thread and not anchor you down to the updated post.
-- The realtime activity page isn't as slick as it was. In the given amount of time to get that out we had to punt on some of the fluffy cool cosmetic stuff like ajaxing in the new incoming posts. In the new version, when a post gets submitted to the forums, rather than the post being dynamically displayed on the page, there will be an auto page refresh. There is also no indication if the post is a new topic or a reply. In the near future, we hope to make this forum feature even better.
I think I have covered most of the changes that will impact you on our new platform. Our team has spent many months and countless days getting this to where it is today and I'm very thankful for their dedication and hard work. I feel like this is a whole new beginning for the forums with many more great and exciting things to come down the line.
Please give it a spin and if you happen to find or discover anything quirky or buggy in our forums, please do not hesitate to let me know in this thread. I also welcome any feedback that you may have in regards to the slight feature changes above. Good or bad, I'd like to hear it.
Thank you all for your time and your continued dedication to the CNET Forums!
Cheers!
-Lee
Note: This post was edited by forum moderator Edited on 09/29/2010 on 3:11 PM PT
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